How to Prevent WIPs from Unraveling

As one can guess from our birthday post, August (and summer in general) is almost always Crazy Time at our house. As a consequence, I realize we've been posting fewer patterns and crochet tips lately, but Crazy Time is coming to an end and we can get finally be getting back to crochet as usual.

One of the things we got behind on was our crochet news. As members of the Crochet Guild of America, we get their free quarterly newsletter. The Autumn 2014 edition (which came out earlier this summer) has a review on a vintage crochet tool from Susan Bates called Clipson Hooks. The gimmick is that there is a clip under the shank of the hook through which you can slip the last loop of your crochet WIP to keep it from unraveling when you have to set the work down. We, of course, were immediately overcome with a covetous urge to scour eBay for any of these such hooks that may remain in existence.

But then it occurred to us that one does not need specialized, hard-to-find hooks to prevent our crochet WIPs from unraveling. All one needs is an ordinary clip-on stitch marker.

When ready to pause your crocheting, remove the loop from the hook.

Then simply clip your stitch marker onto that loop.

Now if the working end of the yarn gets pulled, the stitch marker will get caught at the last stitch and prevent your WIP from unraveling.